Monday, September 28, 2009

Unintelligent Design

I wrote a while back of a letter I read in Science about a different line of attack against the so-called intelligent design idea. It is to exposed the fact that if the human body was indeed the product of an intelligent design, the design itself isn't very intelligent. Based on simply, basic problem of the human anatomy, one could term ID as Incompetent Design, which makes any deity that is responsible for such a design to be highly dumb.

Well now, Art Hobson has also published something similar. In this case, he calls it Unintelligent Design. Here, he looks at one very common argument that ID proponents often use, the eye. Their typical argument is that the eye is way too complex for it to come out of evolution and random formation. Art Hobson used the same type of argument that I mentioned earlier to point the flaw in the human eye.

But the eye betrays its evolutionary origin with a tell-tale flaw: The retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry signals from the retina’s light-sensing cells lie on top of those cells and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the eye’s blind spot. Any intelligent designer would be offended by such a clumsy arrangement. The human eye was not designed; it was inherited as the result of long-term evolutionary development. The eyes of all vertebrate animals are linked with our invertebrate relatives that have only simple eyes that detect light but can’t form an image. In fact, molecular studies have recently found a direct link between the genetic structures that control primitive invertebrate light sensors and those that control sophisticated mammalian lens structures.

As with the tired argument about Thermo's second law and evolution, I'm guessing that this argument would not reach to those who should be educated. Not that they would care, or that this would change their minds anyway.